The Accidental and the Purposeful

Talking with friends and reading reviews of Emily Perkin’s latest novel, The Forrests, I came away bemused by the range of responses. The critics tended to be impressed but their admiration struck me as less than heartfelt, and the compliments were sometimes delivered with a backhand, as in Simon Savidge’s review on Beattie’s Book Blog. ‘The writing is utterly beautiful’ Savidge writes, ‘yet sometimes Perkins so wants to fill the book with words – which some people will love – the sentences can become never-ending’. The opinions of the friends and colleagues I’ve spoken to suggest a similar jumble: esteem, even fondness, strained by frustration.

A comment on a reader’s reviewing website pointed out that the personality of the characters in The Forrests seemed blurry and the story was hard to follow. This observation seems to me germane. The vast gaps in the narrative, the often unclear motivations of characters, the poetic reoccurrence of what seem to be random memories rarely serve to subtly advance the plot or even to develop our sense of a coherent character. Take, for instance, Dorothy’s detailed recollection of a stay on a childhood commune while her sister Evelyn is recovering from a serious injury: Light came through the window and she was on second base on the field at the commune, followed Michael’s gaze from the batter’s mound to see Eve and Daniel plow toward her through the long grass. Michael thwacked the bat into his palm. Gold lit the grasses. Daniel’s steady stride, Eve behind him, a shadow. This memory serves no predictable function in the novel. It doesn’t develop our understanding of Dorothy’s attachment to her siblings, nor add any special poignancy to the present of the plot. Like all memory, it is accidental, endowed with significance simply because it is remembered: the act of recall is the miracle.

As far as I can tell, the mix of admiration and resistance to The Forrests is a very good sign regarding its staying power. The reaction calls to mind the insightful comments of a review of To the Lighthouse written by Conrad Aiken in 1927. Of Virginia Woolf’s famously difficult novel, Aiken writes, ‘… one’s irritation is soon lost in the growing sense that Mrs Woolf has at last a complexity and force of theme which is commensurate with the elaborateness and self-consciousness of her technical “pattern”. By degrees, one forgets the manner in the matter.’ By degrees one forgets the manner in the matter. The point is a sound one: if the purpose of a book is significant enough, its difficulty must be excused. In writing a book that appears to be about nothing much at all – and, therefore, about life as it is mostly commonly lived – Perkins has followed in the footsteps of Woolf. The ‘pattern’ of both To the Lighthouse and The Forrests might be said to be the collecting of little moments which suggest both the wonder and sadness of time passing.

If the spirit of Woolf presides over the theme of The Forrests, it is even more present in its structure. Consider the narrative of the book (I don’t say ‘plot’, since the word seems largely irrelevant here): Perkins’s latest spans six decades, following Dorothy Forrest and her siblings from youth until the final hour of Dorothy’s life as an elderly woman, often skipping years within a single paragraph and then settling in on a minor, pedestrian scene with an unsettling lyric intensity, as in the following: ‘The mothers took the children for a walk over some fields, Louisa staggering ahead beside the hedgerows, Grace issuing orders from her pushchair, the baby strapped against Dorothy’s chest. Around dawn the rain had stopped and the green world glistened. Water hung in the cow parsley, the same colour as the thin circle of moon Louisa was calling to.’

The passage is clearly beautiful, but what makes it unsettling is our initial failure to understand why such an ordinary moment is rendered with such careful attention to detail while more seemingly important events, such as the death of Lee and Frank, Dorothy’s parents, is only given a passing mention in a few offhand sentences. As in To the Lighthouse, where the imposing and central character of Mrs Ramsay dies in brackets, the structure of the Forrests is one which implies that the mundane and the monumental are equally important. In the end, they may be impossible to distinguish.

So, very well, some readers might concede, the book runs fluidly through the decades and disperses its character development over various intensely precise moments – that is all as it may be, but I still was left wanting more: more story, more purpose, more coherence, more something. I empathise with the feeling. By the time we come to the end of The Forrests, there is an awkward whiff of dissatisfaction surrounding the book. I get this. At the same time, I can’t help but to think that the disappointment is not only intentional, but is, in the end, the point.

Early on in the book, Dorothy is reflecting on her and her fiancé’s intention to pay for their own wedding and make their own way, when she stumbles upon a central truth of The Forrests. Perkins writes: ‘She and Andrew would front the wedding themselves. He’d taken a job in the caretaking division at the polytechnic, since no one was interested in showing or buying his paintings. Everyone had their own definition of survival.’ Survival strikes me as the central business of The Forrests. What must be survived is not war nor famine but only the ordinary disaster of living.

While the novel is rich with wonder and beauty and displays a startling awareness of the value of life, the fact of the constant demand for survival – and the inability of some of the characters to pull it off – underpins every page. The dissatisfaction that may accompany our reading is, in fact, the lingering dissatisfaction of life itself, a fact as inevitable as death or the kaleidoscopic Auckland weather. There can be no doubt that The Forrestsoffers plenty of reasons for hope and is stuffed with meaningful interludes, but beneath it all there is a dazzlingly ordinary sense of life’s falling a little short. As in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, where the much anticipated visit to the lighthouse turns out to be entirely anticlimactic, the arc of living in TheForrests strains away from grand redemption and conclusive plot development because life itself, the novel suggests, is not an orderly or progressive affair.

While I can relate to the ambivalence of some responses to manner of The Forrests, I cannot but marvel at the courage of the novel’s matter. So much popular contemporary fiction seems to offer, if not hope and purpose, at least the promise of something quite special: an escape into an exotic setting, into unbridled pleasure, into the whitewashed fantasy of history. Beside Perkin’s latest novel, such books wilt. Their assurance is cheap and ephemeral. Their offers are unsustainable. The Forrests, conversely, is built to last, a handbook for our survival in the inevitable narrative of the ordinary, where the accident of the beginning and the dire fact of the ending must never be allowed to depreciate the intensity of all the pages in between.

THOMAS GOUGH is the pen name of Thom Conroy, who lectures in Creative Writing and English Literature at Massey University in Palmerston North. His fiction has been published widely in New Zealand and the United States and recognised in Best American Short Stories 2011.